Quality Driven Requirements Engineering for Development of Crisis Management Systems

Introduction

The past decades’ terror attacks such as those in New York (2001), Madrid (2004) and London (2005), and natural disasters such as the tsunami in the Pacific Ocean (2004) and Japan (2011), the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005), and the earthquake in Haiti (2010) have dramatically made governments, public health authorities and citizens world-wide aware of insufficiencies in current crisis management practices. Accordingly, spending of resources to develop measures for crisis prevention, alleviation of the consequences and aftermath restoration is generally regarded to be justified from both humane and financial perspectives. When handling disasters and crises, it must be taken into regard that these situations often evolve in unexpected ways and require specific responses (Turoff, White, Plotnick, & Hiltz, 2008). Information systems have been recognized to be key resources in these circumstances by providing support for situational awareness, decision making, coordination of actions, and exchange of information (Jefferson, 2006). However, to just simply introduce information technology does not automatically lead to more efficient crisis handling (Landgren, 2007). The systems need to adequately support the complex, unpredictable, and continuously evolving crisis management process (Mendonca, Jefferson, & Harrald, 2007). Fulfillment of such requirements is a considerable challenge for systems developers and the methods they use.